A collection of thoughts, ideas, and opinions independently written by members of the MSU community and curated by MSU Libraries

Tag Archives: Python

In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how we can use the exact same algorithm to optimize walking tours in large cities. If …

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm summer right around the corner, it’s about time we start planning our summer fun. If …

Probably one of the more au courant methods in digital humanities scholarship is topic modeling, explanations of which range from the math-y and abstruse to the pictures and simple language approach. Briefly, topic modeling is one way of algorithmically reading texts at scale—the bigger the number, the better. In my previous draft of this post, …

Remember that Python usage survey that went around the interwebs late last year? Well, the results are finally out and I’ve visualized them below for your perusal. This survey has been running for two years now (2013-2014), so where we have data for both years, I’ve charted the results so we can see the changes …

The apocalypse is nigh. Soon, binary executables and containers in object stores will join the many Web-based pipelines and the several virtual machine images on the dystopic wasteland of “reproducible science.” Anyway. I had a conversation a few weeks back with a senior colleague about container-based approaches (like Docker) wherein they advocated the shipping around …

Brian O’Shea (a physics prof at Michigan State) asked me the following, and I thought I’d post it on my blog to get a broader set of responses. I know the answer is “Python 3”, but I would appreciate specific thoughts from people with experience either with the specific packages below, or in teaching Python …

It’s been well over a year since I wrote my last tutorial, so I figure I’m overdue. This time, I’m going to focus on how you can make beautiful data visualizations in Python with matplotlib. There are already tons of tutorials on how to make basic plots in matplotlib. There’s even a huge example plot …

I’m on a European trip that involves several plane flights accompanied by long airport stays, and I just used some of that time to do a bit of tedious coding on khmer. The coding I did was to add proper exception handling to khmer’s internal file loading routines (see the pull request). The old behavior …

There were lots of problems with PyCon this year. For example, the free, hi-speed wifi made you log in each day. And it was in Montreal, so one of my foreign students couldn’t come because he didn’t get a visa in time. The company booths were not centrally located. And, worst of all, the PyCon …

Earlier this year, Sagemath Cloud went into open beta so anyone can play around with it. If you’re not familiar with the service, it’s a free cloud-based web service that provides access to personal directories, a terminal, IPython Notebook (incl. Rmagic), a LaTeX editor, compiler, & viewer, and so much more — all from the …